Taxes from 5 years old perspective

We’ve been giving our firstborn son our spare cents whenever he has done chores like helping with cooking or cleaning his room.

Today he helped me by cutting raw fish for soup and I decided to give him and his 3 years old brother 20 cents each. This lead to an interesting discussion about pensions and taxes.

Boys start to fight immediately about where the money should be put.

“Please, don’t fight or taxman will come and take half of your money away and split the rest between you two.”

“What is a taxman? Why is he taking my money?”

“Actually taxes are something that has been already taken from mom and dad before we get our money from working. It’s used by the government to maintain for example kindergarten, schools and all the roads.”

He digests this new information a while and then enlightens me.

“Aa, now I get it. Taxman takes my money away so he can give it back to me as a pension when I’m old.”

I congratulated him for this very smart and true idea — I still have no idea where on why he had heard about pensions and how he connected the dots.

He had still something on his mind as he was again quiet and after a long pause asked:

“Is taxman also going to take half of your money when you fight with mom?”